Good to be home

It's only been a week and a half, but it sure feels good to be home. I woke up early, got a cup of tea and sat looking over the Bay.

The early morning light in Northern California has a luminous quality I've never seen anywhere else. Something about the way low-in-the-sky rays of sunlight beam through the morning layer of fog that so often enshrouds the Bay. The plants in my back pocket garden look their best in this soft, low light, and I can't resist taking a few photos.

My robust clump of Miscanthus senensis Morning Light, is, as the name implies, perfect in this soft light. It highlights the white edges of each blade of grass and makes the clump almost glow. Beside it, Oriental lilies are blooming, with a few buds still coming on. They'd just started to open when I left town to visit family in NH and attend the BlogHer conference in Chicago, and I was afraid I'd miss them all. Should have known better.

My husband did a good job of watering the plants in pots while I was gone. The tomatoes are a tangle of leafy stems, yellow buds and little green tomatoes. A low-hanging branch on one cherry tomato has a cluster of ripe, red fruit. That's the one branch that didn't get chomped by marauding deer earlier this summer when I put the tomato pots out on my sunny front stoop. So it goes. After a stint of trying to surround the pots with chicken wire barriers (real attractive!), I moved them to the slightly less sunny but totally deerproof back deck. They've all recovered, but tomato production has been delayed a few weeks.

In my back garden, I see the Sally Holmes rose is trying to take over the world again. It leans over the Peewee oakleaf hydrangea, shading it, and mostly obscures the entrance to crawl space under the house (a good thing, unless you need to use it). About time for another round of pruning. But I can't bring myself to do it while it's still blooming...and Sally Holmes blooms all summer and into the fall.

A gold crocosmia, the one I relocated last year because it clashed with the pink flowers in my front garden, is starting to bloom. It's looking fine against a backdrop of hydrangea. A neighboring beebalm, Raspberry Wine, towers above it, happy at last to be in a spot that gets afternoon shade. The white anemones beside them, now coming into bud, are looking kind of puny -- either water-starved or gopher-bit, I'm not sure which...maybe both.

Over the Bay, the sky is clearing, the morning fog is lifting...it's another beautiful day in Northern California.

I find myself humming an old Simon and Garfunkel tune:
"Gee but it's great to be back home, home is where I want to be."

Oh, yeah.